On May 5, nine Fairfax County Democrats voted to adopt a $5.7 billion budget. Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), the lone Republican on the ten-member Board of Supervisors, cast the only vote against it.
That much was predictable, and by itself it is not the story. The story is what Herrity asked for instead — how long he has been asking — and which nine people keep saying no.
“My biggest disappointment is the Board’s continued refusal to do a deep dive on the budget to look for efficiencies, savings, and reductions,” he said after the vote, “which has been my recommendation for many years.”
Not a demand for a smaller number. A demand that somebody open the book.
Which is worth sitting with, because an audit is close to free. It does not cut a program, cancel a contract, or fire anyone. It just produces information.
So why would nine people who control a $5.7 billion budget refuse, year after year, to let anyone look at it?
There is only one reason to avoid a question this cheap. The answer.
Every line in a $5.7 billion county budget was put there by somebody, for a reason, at some point in the past. Programs get created to solve a problem that existed in 2011, or 2016, or 2019. The problem changes. The community changes. The line item does not. It rolls forward into the next budget because it was in the last one, and because removing it requires an argument that no one has time to make during a budget cycle.
Herrity’s core point is that Fairfax County has never done the work of asking, systematically, which of those lines still earn their place. He made the same argument in February 2025, when he described the county as governed by “a Board that has refused to do a deep dive on the budget as prior Boards have done, or to even keep track of the spending commitments it makes during the year,” according to the Fairfax Times.
He had been more specific a month earlier. As the county stared down a forecast shortfall of nearly $300 million, Herrity told 7News: “Not only have they refused to have an outside review of our budget as other boards have done, but they continue to increase spending on political agenda items and they spent all of last year’s surplus.”
Read that again: they refused. Not the economy, not Richmond, not Washington. The nine Democrats who hold every other seat on this Board.
An outside review is not a slogan. It is an ordinary tool of government that, by Herrity’s account, earlier Fairfax County boards were willing to use — and this Democrat majority has not been.
The numbers he cites explain the urgency. Over the last four years, by his accounting, the Board increased spending by $868 million while celebrating $124 million in cuts. This year the Board trimmed $32 million — and the budget still grew about 5 percent, driven by what Herrity called “Board priorities.”
Homeowners felt the arithmetic. The Board lowered the real estate tax rate a quarter of a penny, from $1.1225 to $1.12 per $100 of assessed value. Because assessments rose, the average homeowner’s bill still went up roughly $337. The celebrated rate cut returned about $20.
“Affordability is not a priority of this board,” Herrity said.
It would be easy, and wrong, to say the county has no one checking the books. It does. Understanding what that office actually is makes Herrity’s case stronger, not weaker.
The Office of Financial and Program Audit was established by the Board under Virginia Code §15.2-825 and works, in its own words, “under the guidance and direction of the Audit Committee.” Its published team is four people: a Performance Auditor to the Board, a deputy, a lead analytics auditor, and an intern. A separate Internal Audit office exists as well — but it reports to the County Executive, meaning county management, not to the elected Board.
Look at what that four-person office is assigned. Its FY2025 study plan lists a handful of targeted reviews for the year: purchase-card transaction data, the volunteer management system, energy efficiency in county facilities, and follow-ups on emergency-services billing. That is careful, useful work. It is also, by design, a short list of narrow studies — and the office does not pick that list on its own. The topics are assigned by the Audit Committee.
Now look at who controls that committee. Four supervisors sit on it, alongside two citizen members: Chairman Daniel Storck (D-Mount Vernon), James Bierman Jr. (D-Dranesville), Andres Jimenez (D-Mason) — and Pat Herrity.
Three Democrats. One Republican. On the committee that decides what Fairfax County is allowed to audit.
That is the whole story in one line. Herrity is not an outsider demanding a watchdog that does not exist. He sits on the county’s own audit committee, he has served nearly two decades, and every other supervisor in that room is a Democrat. The machinery exists. Democrats decide where to point it — and they have never pointed it at the $5.7 billion question.
The strongest argument for Herrity’s deep dive is buried in the audit office’s own paperwork.
One OFPA review of the Northern Virginia Mutual Aid Agreement identified $7.9 million in non-billed ground transports for non-county residents between FY2017 and FY2021 — money the county was entitled to recover and simply had not. In proposing the purchase-card study, the office noted that Fairfax County spends roughly $19 million a year on p-cards, and that detailed transaction data covering about 40 percent of those purchases is not reviewed on a regular basis by any agency.
Four auditors, looking at narrow slices of county operations, keep finding millions of dollars. That is not an argument that the auditors are failing. It is an argument that nobody has ever let them look at the whole thing.
Herrity has documented what happens when the accounting stops. Writing on this site in September 2024, he laid out the county’s carryover process — the annual vote that spends the prior year’s leftover money.
That year the Board approved roughly $180 million in county surplus funds plus $59.2 million in unspent federal pandemic aid. It did so in the same year the average homeowner’s tax bill rose 7 percent, and while the Board discussed what it termed “revenue diversification.” Herrity’s objection was not that the spending was all bad; he acknowledged many of the items were good. His objection was to the pattern — needs deferred out of the public budget process and funded later through carryover, when, as he put it, there is less public attention.
And one line in that column should end the argument about whether Fairfax County needs a deeper audit. The school system, Herrity wrote, “could not provide an answer as to how it spent $83M of last year’s surplus.”
Eighty-three million dollars, and no answer to a supervisor asking where it went.
He is not the only one raising it. The Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, a non-partisan watchdog group that has tracked county budgets for decades, has argued for years that leftover revenue should be returned to taxpayers through lower future rates rather than absorbed into new spending. Residents and civic associations have said the same thing at hearing after hearing.
Nine Democrats have heard all of it and adopted the budget anyway: Chairman Jeffrey C. McKay (At-Large), Vice-Chair Kathy Smith (Sully), Rachna Sizemore Heizer (Braddock), James Bierman Jr. (Dranesville), Rodney Lusk (Franconia), Walter Alcorn (Hunter Mill), Andres Jimenez (Mason), Daniel Storck (Mount Vernon), and Dalia Palchik (Providence).
Every one of them is on the ballot in November 2027.
Here is the honest answer: nobody knows. That is not a dodge. That is the finding.
No one can tell a Fairfax County taxpayer what is inside that $5.7 billion, because the review that would tell them has never been performed. What can be said is what sits there uncounted, and every item on this list is documented in the county’s own records:
Not one of those figures has been through the kind of review Herrity is asking for. Not one.
Maybe every dollar of it is spent perfectly. Maybe a full review would vindicate all nine of them and embarrass Pat Herrity. If that were the expectation, ordering the audit would be the easiest political win available — proof, on the record, that Fairfax County Democrats spend your money well.
They have not ordered it. Draw your own conclusion about why.
The caricature of the lone dissenter is that he objects and nothing happens. The record from this spring says otherwise.
On May 19, the Board voted unanimously to direct staff to examine a property-tax rebate program — returning money to property owners in years the county runs a significant surplus. The proposal was Herrity’s. He asked staff to look at how Henrico County, Louisa County and the city of Richmond have handled rebates, and argued it “would be a shame to have the funding available” and not return it, according to FFXnow. Chairman Jeffrey C. McKay (D-At-Large) said he had “no objection to having a conversation.” Supervisor Walter Alcorn (D-Hunter Mill) voted yes while calling rebates “kind of gimmicky.”
It passed 10 to 0.
🚨 FAIRFAX DEMOCRATS JUST ADMITTED IT OUT LOUD 🚨
— Fairfax GOP (@FairfaxGOP) May 29, 2026
May 19: The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 10-0 to study a property-tax-rebate program — after lone Republican Pat Herrity (R-Springfield, up Nov. 2027) brought it forward.
Chairman Jeff McKay (D-At-Large, up Nov.…
The lesson is not that Democrats have converted. A study is not a rebate, and directing staff to look at something costs nothing. But it proves the excuse is empty: when Herrity brings a concrete proposal, Democrats can vote for it. They simply choose not to when it comes to opening the budget itself.
Which narrows the question considerably. A study of a rebate is safe, because it looks forward at money the county has not spent yet. An audit looks backward, at money already gone. Only one of those can embarrass the people who approved it.
This is the case for an audit stated plainly. A budget is a statement of priorities, and under this Democrat majority Fairfax County’s priorities have accumulated rather than been chosen. Nobody sat down in 2026 and decided that this $5.7 billion, distributed exactly this way, is what Fairfax County communities need now. It is what the county was already doing, plus growth — and nine Democrats signed for it.
An audit of the kind Herrity has asked for — a genuine, line-by-line review of whether existing programs still serve current needs — is not an attack on county government. It is the maintenance that keeps county government able to respond to what residents need next. Every dollar still funding a 2015 priority is a dollar unavailable for a 2026 one. Every unexamined line is a small tax increase deferred to the future.
Herrity has also proposed putting the county’s checkbook online so residents can see the spending themselves, and he says he led the push to have the School Board hire an independent auditor. Those proposals share a premise worth stating out loud: sunlight is cheaper than surplus.
He is not leaving the fight. In March, Herrity announced he is seeking a sixth term on the Board.
🎉 GREAT NEWS: PAT HERRITY IS RUNNING AGAIN! 🎉
— Fairfax GOP (@FairfaxGOP) March 20, 2026
The ONLY Republican on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors just announced he's seeking a sixth term—and his message is exactly what we need to hear:
💬 "I'm not ready to give up on Fairfax County."
For nearly 20 years,…
Every seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is on the ballot in November 2027 — Chairman McKay’s at-large seat, all nine districts, and Herrity’s Springfield seat with them. Between now and then, the Board will adopt two more budgets.
Ask your Democrat supervisor one question before that vote: what would an audit of this budget turn up that you would rather your constituents never saw? Pat Herrity has spent years asking for the answer, outnumbered in the very room where the audit list gets written. In November 2027, all nine of them have to explain why they never wanted one.
